Resource mobilisation and social entrepreneurship: social bricolage as antecedent and outcome

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has become a rapidly growing research domain in academia. SE aims to solve social problems and/or meet social needs using a business approach and is recognised as a crucial player in the modern world. SE faces serious resource challenges, however, in terms of surviving in a market, generating innovation, and achieving established objectives because of its particular combination of having a dual social and economic mission. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to better understanding of resource mobilisation in the SE area and the study attempts to address three broad research questions: (1) What resources do social enterprises require? (2) How do social enterprises acquire and mobilise the necessary resources efficiently? And (3) How does bricolage as a resource mobilisation strategy act in SE? This thesis will, therefore, enrich the SE and strategic management literature. The thesis contains one systematic review study and two pieces of empirical research. The systematic review provides a comprehensive and multilevel overview of resource research, further develops the understanding of mechanism that supports resource mobilisation in the SE context, and indicates a future research framework for scholars. The first of the two empirical papers investigates the relationship between strategic alliances, bricolage, and social impact scaling, and adds entrepreneurial orientation as a moderator between bricolage and social impact generation. The second quantitative paper analyses network bricolage in depth as a sub-strategy of bricolage, aiming to explore resource constraints as antecedents to network bricolage and how network bricolage affects innovation focus and financial performance. This research also examines mutual trust as a moderator between resource constraints and network bricolage. The thesis attempts to fill the existing research gaps and presents several theoretical contributions and managerial implications. It also suggests directions for future research.